The Amber Rooms

by Ian Hocking

  ‘Which events?’

  Pasha gave her a disappointed look. He turned towards the door and pulled her arm. ‘You will come along.’

  Saskia considered him. He was off-balance and tense. She fell into step as he walked her. At the door to the enfilade, she barged him with her hip. Pasha was heavier but she had tuned her movement to precision, and she had the surprise. He stumbled and released her arm. She watched him turn back—his mouth twisting down in irritation—and she lifted her forearm, which provided an unconscious cue to grip her wrist. He did so. Saskia trapped his hand against her wrist and, using the remainder of his turning energy, and a little of her own, steered his arm in a windmilling action. Pasha’s elbow rose until his hand had passed over his head and come to rest against his shoulder-blade. He gasped and teetered on the balls of his feet. His cheek was against the door jamb.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Quiet, Pasha.’

  Still holding him, Saskia sniffed the fingertips of her left hand once more. She had it: Guerlain’s fragrance Mouchoir de Monsieur, favoured by Count Nakhimov.

  ‘Don’t call me Pasha.’

  ‘Where is your weapon?’ she asked.

  ‘It is within the armoury, woman,’ he whispered, as though embarrassed. ‘Where else?’

  ‘Get it. Then come with me.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Your father is in danger.’

  He stopped struggling. ‘Danger? What do you know?’

  ‘I was with him this evening. He helped organise the breakin.’

  Pasha stopped struggling. He regarded her with total horror. In that moment, as he looked at her blank expression, and she watched him, each understood that Saskia had told the truth. It had been a weighted guess on her part. For him, she reasoned, it resolved certain ambiguities in his father’s behaviour, or spoke to a truth that he had always known.

  ‘I will tell you everything,’ she said, ‘but only if you arrange my immediate escape from the palace.’

  ‘Father is truly in danger?’

  ‘He is.’

  ~

  Saskia was crouching in the shadow of a staircase on the side of the palace that faced the square. Between the chimes of countless clocks, which reached her through the windows above, she heard the calls and footfalls of palace staff and, beyond them, the greater confusion of the night: shouts, horses at a trot, and alarm bells. It would not take long to mobilise the troops in the barracks around the Tsar’s Village. In the meantime, police carriages had stopped at the main entrance to the palace, and its other entrances, to deploy uniformed and plain-clothes men. The confusion did not diminish. Lanterns were dropped and subordinates cursed. Saskia caught rumours of a full-scale social revolutionary attack on the palace; of chemical gas released into the Grand Enfilade by crack German troops; of an explosion within the Amber Room itself, melting the resin to burning pools. In the blackness next to the external staircase, Saskia listened to the night and its signatures. Meanwhile, she continued her whispered conversation with Ego, which was itself a confusion: the computer did not trust her and would not speak plainly in answer to her questions.

  Those questions were gears that ground teeth-in-teeth. Why could Ego not talk directly to her brain, as it had done before? Another guess: because her mind was different; the encryption was undone. Why had the time band sent her to different versions of the Amber Room instead of moving her through time? Because she had been a fool to assume that the countdown had been sent by a friend. Why wasn’t she wearing the band now? Because this Saskia had not used it to travel in time; or the revolutionaries had stolen it.

  ‘The date,’ she said. ‘At least tell me that.’

  ‘I must repeat that I will provide as much help as I can, consistent with my confidence in your identity. To help you fully would constitute a risk to the mission. At present, I cannot be sure that you are Saskia Brandt.’

  ‘I am certainly Saskia Brandt,’ she whispered. ‘My problem is that I am one of many.’

  ‘The connectome of the neural network is quite different, taking the standpoint of a Euclidean distance metric, from the identifying connectome of your network that I sampled earlier this evening. In short, you are not Saskia.’

  In the quietness, Saskia tried to work through the implications of her voyaging mind. She could not. Though her knowledge of physics was thorough, no theory, from 2023 or before, could explain how a malfunction in the dark band would usher her through a brief series of experiences: the soldier in the Amber Room from World War Two; the flight deck of DF323; and her time in Tiflis.

  What did those moments have in common? What was there to learn? In each, Saskia had felt a growing sense of control. She had lost her sense of futility. If each moment was drawn from a universe parallel to her own—that was, a universe in which she did not come to save David Proctor—then she was freed from the bounds of her paradox. The future of that alternative universe would be unknown to her. She could have choice. Since her first experience of time travel, her will had struggled beneath the weight of the notion that certain effects had occurred; it was her duty to speak her line at the place and hour appointed.

  What if the malfunctioning band had freed her from that constraint? She could act. She could do good and claim the goodness.

  A second thought cooled her excitement: if she had no choice in her original universe, who said she had choice in this one? Its future must still be constrained by its past. The difference, if one existed, was that its future was inscrutable.

  ‘Ego, the quantum entanglement event you spoke of earlier coincided with my awareness that I had transferred to this universe. Isn’t it possible that the quantum event and this transfer are linked?’

  ‘Put your glasses on.’

  Frowning, Saskia took the tinted glasses from her collar. Their frames were thin and the arms tipped with ivory. She put them on and her world became yellow. Shapes were immediately clearer as though the dawn had risen.

  ‘I’m wearing them,’ she said. ‘Now what?’

  ‘You will find the technology useful.’

  Saskia remembered wearing smart glasses during her first investigation for the FIB. They had responded to her blinks.

  She blinked twice. Nothing happened. She tried a slow, single blink. When she opened her eyes, geometric shapes and text filled her vision. The overlap was stable on the real world. It did not move with her eyes. The geometric shapes looked like those triangles and dashes that were painted on runways to help pilots judge distance and speed. The shapes painted the side of the Summer Palace and the frontage visible between her and the far wall of the square. Other polygons targeted objects: trees, doors, and people. Beneath these polygons were trivial data, such as the genus of the tree, but also more important information such as whether a door was locked, and whether a soldier was moving away or towards her. As Saskia looked around this blazing constellation of information, the shapes and text juddered to match the scene. There was a date floating near the corner of her eye. As she struggled to focus on it, the date grew larger: 1st January, 1970.

  ‘A useful technology,’ she said, ‘but crude in comparison to i-Core.’

  ‘What is i-Core?’

  ‘A nanotechnology that infests my blood. It repairs me and works for my benefit—or perhaps its own. At the moment, these benefits amount to the same thing.’

  ‘I am not aware of any technology by that name.’

  ‘Were these glasses provided by the Foderative Investigationsburo? In this universe, do I still work for them?’

  Again, Ego said nothing.

  ‘Ego,’ she said, ‘given my behaviour and the quantum event, don’t you agree that there is a chance I’m telling the truth?’

  ‘Every possibility has an associated probability.’

  ‘Ego, please. Let’s start with the date. My glasses tell me it is January, 1970. I don’t believe that.’

  ‘In all likelihood, the quantum event has reset their fastw
are. The same thing almost happened to me.’ Ego paused for the length of a human sigh, but no sound came from the little card. ‘Look for the constellation Cepheus. Face north. Look directly up and a little to the east. Do you see it?’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  ‘Within Cepheus, we find the Mu Cephei, a runaway star with a peculiar velocity of approximately eighty kilometres per second. Your lenses can use the relative position of this star against its neighbours to calculate the date.’

  The portion of sky acquired a yellow rectangle. It throbbed once, turned green, and the superimposed date changed to 23rd May, 1908. Exactly the same date as the masked ball.

  ‘It worked. Thank you.’

  ‘My Saskia,’ said Ego, ‘let’s call her Saskia Beta, never thanked me.’

  ‘Ego, meet Saskia Alpha. Thanks.’

  She blinked hard. The heads-up display faded to a ghost, then was gone. She took a long breath and raised her scarf until it covered the bridge of her nose. Tying it behind her head, she touched a tender spot, where there was a swelling. She was frustrated by the absence of any memory for this life, this body, but she had two hands. She felt doubly powerful. No longer did she need clever combinations of her teeth and right hand to conduct the basics of her life: dressing, eating. She remembered an incident two years before, when she had wept at the close of a theatre play. Kamo had been with her. He asked why such a jolly production should leave her in tears. The truth was that, while she anticipated and steeled herself against those moments when the absence of her hand would sting her, she had not concerned herself with the habit of applause. She could not clap. Ever again.

  Saskia looked at her hands. She gathered her skirt at the knees and wound its edge into a knot. She tucked her glasses into her bosom. This dash—to fit within the circuit of the guard at the north-east entrance—would be a useful test of the fitness of this body.

  She took a breath, held it, took another, and sprinted across the facade of the Great Palace. She relaxed as her legs extended and her arms swung. This body was fit. She was faster with two hands. Perhaps it was the balancing effect. Her stride length increased and she flew on her toes until her speed was ten metres per second. Whatever this version of Saskia had done so far in life, she had maintained her fitness. Window after window of the palace telescoped by. Fast enough. She slowed as she reached the chapel and looked for the guard, who was pacing less than fifty metres away. She focused on him. She broke down to a jog. Her long strides fell on the gravel in perfect synchrony with his. At the outer wall, the hoof-falls and wheel scrapes of the road covered her movements, and as the guard turned the corner, she skipped into shadow.

  The magnificent outer gate was locked.

  She looked at the wall. There were thin grooves in the cladding and a chimney gap between the chapel and the outer wall. She took a breath and dropped her shoulders and dashed into the gap. Her right foot kicked against the outer wall and she surged upward. She twisted, scuffed against the chapel wall, twisted again, and gripped the ledge of the outer wall. She paused to check the progress of the guard. He had not heard her.

  She tumbled over the wall and landed on all fours next to a fine horse. After brushing the grit from her palms, she checked that Ego and the glasses were still in place. Pasha was holding the horse. He looked at her with a sour expression.

  ‘It’s been a while since I saw your acrobatics. You could teach my men a thing or two.’

  ‘Did you telephone ahead?’

  ‘Yes. There was no answer.’

  ‘Do you trust me?’

  He slid a travelling cloak from the horse.

  ‘Put this on,’ he said, shaking it. ‘Quickly.’

  Saskia allowed him to put the cloak across her shoulders. It was heavy, black velvet with a hood. She inclined her head and put her hand over his. ‘Then you trust me.’

  ‘I do not, Ms Tucholsky.’

  ~

  Saskia sat opposite Pasha in their train compartment as they entered St Petersburg. She was counting her radial pulse. For the duration of the journey, it had not peaked above forty-five beats per minute. That satisfied her. She used the steady wash of blood to discipline her thoughts. Her mind turned to the day when she had taken Pasha—that is, she thought, Pasha Alpha—to the Tsar’s Village. Her escape through the Amber Room had seemed so trivial in prospect that she had considered it done. How horrifying that Kamo had appeared to ruin the day. She remembered the fight, the pain, and the dash from the Summer Palace. How much of this overlapped with the reality where Pasha Beta had become a Hussar? She needed to find out. But Pasha had been as reluctant as Ego to answer her questions, and now that the train was drawing close to St Petersburg, she feared that the pace of events would accelerate beyond her capacity to react rationally. She made an explicit promise to herself that she should exploit this opportunity. Her voyaging mind had taken her to a reality whose future was perhaps undetermined. She would do here what she could not do in her own reality: undo the work of Soso. She must stop him from becoming the man to conduct monologues over Russian sorrows. Her years-long goal—that of a return to the future, to 2023—would come second to this.

  She tried to inventory her disadvantages: no i-Core, which meant her wounds could not heal quickly. The future of this reality might not require her actions as an older woman. She could not, therefore, count on the protection of a paradox.

  She had one advantage. It swept all disadvantages before it.

  She could choose.

  In the compartment, rocking, electrically lit, Saskia watched Pasha. He still wore his bearskin. He was not permitted to alter his uniform in public. She said, ‘Your father will tell us where the thieves have taken the money.’

  ‘They can have it,’ said Pasha, spitting out the words as though the silence had been working on him. ‘I’m helping you only because of Father.’

  ‘You want me there to draw him out,’ Saskia mused. ‘So you can see for yourself whether he is involved in seditionist activities.’

  ‘I recall your medical expertise, too,’ Pasha replied. ‘You told us that you studied medicine in Zurich. Or was that a lie?’

  Saskia sighed. She shaded her eyes from the bulb, which buzzed in its shade.

  ‘This is a great risk for you, Pavel Eduardovitch.’

  ‘It is not,’ he said, with an artificial smile. ‘I am an Imperial officer in pursuit of suspects. I have arrested number three in the hope of finding numbers one and two.’

  ‘And yet you have left your post and told no-one.’

  ‘That will hardly worry my superior, to whose daughter I am betrothed.’

  Saskia grunted. She looked at her left hand. She put it through closing, opening, furling.

  ~

  It had not occurred to Saskia that the parallel residence of the Nakhimovs would be other than the house on the Moika, but Pasha gave the taxi driver an address on Apothecary Island, where the houses were isolated, grand structures rather Swedish in style. They stopped at a gate whose white columns were grey shapes in the night. The courtesy lantern was unlit. That put Saskia in mind of the Swiss villa. The taxi rolled away and Saskia and Pasha stepped to the gate. In the low starlight, Pasha gasped at what Saskia had already seen: the gate was ajar. No St Petersburg house left its gate open overnight, even up here. Pasha swore and reached for his sword, but Saskia pressed on his hand.

  ‘No. They’ve gone already.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Whoever forced the gate. Come.’

  The drive wound through an apple orchard. As he jogged, Pasha’s regimental paraphernalia jangled and his fur-edge cape flowed. Saskia matched his pace. They emerged from the orchard to see a long, three-storeyed house in the baroque style. Its shape was little more than a dark outline against the stars.

  ‘We should check on Pyotor,’ said Pasha, gesturing at a small building near a knoll on the seaward side of the grounds. ‘There should be a light burning in his cottage.’

  Here, on the
exposed hill, a wind from the Gulf of Finland cooled Saskia’s skin. She bowed her head against it. ‘No,’ she said. ‘The observatory.’

  ‘If anything has happened to my father because of you, I won’t answer for the consequences.’

  ‘I would not expect you to.’

  They walked hillward, east of the house, to the grove beyond. An owl moved silently across their approach. There was no moon but starlight and the familiarity of home allowed Pasha to stride into the trees. The path was a pale cataract. Saskia listened to Pasha’s breaths, which came hard. It took a fit man to move with haste in the uniform of a Hussar. The Pasha she had left behind, dying, on the floor of the Amber Room matched this Pasha for height and strength of spirit, but not muscle. This Pasha had thrived in a richer soil.

  Soon, the observatory appeared at the end of the path. It was set on a concrete base twenty feet high. The dome was open to the sky. Starlight reflected from the dome but it was otherwise dark.

  ‘Wait here,’ Pasha whispered, drawing his sword.

  ‘I was about to say the same to you.’

  Pasha turned to her. Even with the darkness adaption of his eyes, Saskia knew he could not see her expression. His, however, was perfectly readable as one of determination and intelligence. He was the model of the man her own, dying Pasha would have wanted to be.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked. ‘Is there a password?’

  ‘There is no password.’

  He frowned. His eyes searched the shape of her face. Then he seemed to give up on her, or remember the danger to his father. He charged on the observatory. There was something absurd about the paraphernalia of his uniform, and Saskia was doubly afraid for his life. She hurried after him.

  The interior of the observatory was too dark even for Saskia. She slid her glasses from her collar and put them on. She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth.

  ‘Near your left hand,’ she said, sadly. ‘There are matches and a lamp.’

  Saskia sighed and removed the glasses. She turned to face the starfield in the doorway and considered the silence of space. Behind her, she heard Pasha strike a match. He gasped. The match went out. She heard the squeak of a lantern, another match striking, and then the light held. She watched her shadow yaw around the doorway.